Taslima Nasreen believes India will uphold her secular ideology

Part two of an interview with author Taslima Nasreen, whose third book in her series of autobiographies was translated into English and released earlier in March. In Spilt: A Life, Nasreen begins with her job as a physician and goes on to narrate the period till a fatwa was announced against her.

Edited excerpts of an interview, in which she speaks on growing intolerance in India, the banning of her book Dwikhandito in West Bengal, and her years in exile.

Do you think India is heading the same way as Bangladesh in terms of religios identity for a nation?

I shouldn’t think it is the same, but the situation in India is alarming. I think India will be able to control it much better than Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, there is a much bigger problem of Islamic fundamentalists. The rise of Hindu fundamentalists is a recent phenomenon.

However, one video [from Tripura] was really disturbing. A mob destroyed the house of one woman who voted for the BJP, but the mob thought she had voted for the CPI(M). The mob beat her and her parents up.

I was extremely upset with what happened in Tripura. They are not your enemies; they are your political opposition. It is not a war like how it was in the Dark Ages. This defeat was in a democracy after elections; you cannot destroy property. But I liked that BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav went to former Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar’s house.

As in Bangladesh, there is a growing intolerance against free-thinkers and writers in India too. Why do you think there has been a growth of fanaticism in this society as a whole?

Most of the time, we see fundamentalists rising from the majority religion in a country. Here [India], I think those who espouse Hindu Rashtra were always like this. It was inside them, but when BJP came to power, they realised it is the time to make this country a Hindu Rashtra. RSS thinks it is now in power. You can have different political ideologies in a country, but why are you killing people? When free thinkers such as Narendra Dabholkar and Gauri Lankesh get killed, it is a problem. They are free to spread their ideology, just like the Congress can spread their ideology, Communists can spread theirs and BJP theirs. People are free to choose what they like.

Many people complained that because Congress and CPI(M) “appeased Muslims”, the [rise of Hindu fundamentalists] is a reaction to that. Appeasing any kind of religious fanatics is wrong. Still, I believe India will uphold her secular ideology and will not allow such people to perpetuate violence.

You have been living in exile for more than two decades. How do you remember your early years of it? And why India?

Those days I was living in many European countries (Sweden, France, Germany) and I was treated as a very important person; a celebrated writer. My books were published in many different European languages. But I always longed for my country. After 10 years or so, I moved to West Bengal, because it was not possible to move back to Bangladesh. I moved to India because it is here I feel at home. I lived in West Bengal because I believed I could live in the Bengali environment; I write in Bengali, so it also important for me.

Did you ever think that your book would ever get banned, especially in West Bengal?

There was a lot of talk after Dwikhandito was published. Some writers and intellectuals didn’t like the book, because they thought I should have taken permission from them before writing about them. Actually, I was not writing about them. I was writing about me and how I saw them, how they treated me and what I felt—my hurt, my pain and my joys. But, suddenly, the book was banned for a totally different reason. When Buddhadeb Bhattacharya banned the book, he said that 25 intellectuals came to him and had asked him to ban it because it would start a riot. I don’t think it was true. But, no Muslim protested against the book. I think they wanted to ban the book anyway. There was a writer called Sunil Ganguly who was against the book, maybe because he thought I would write about him and what he did, because Dwikhandito was an autobiography in a series. Maybe he wanted to prevent me from writing any more. He was a very good friend of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. He wrote in a pro-government newspaper Aaj Kal that some parts of the book had to be deleted. He was a such a big and celebrated writer; he should not be afraid.

I knew Mr Bhattacharya and Jyoti Basu and both of them were very friendly to me.

What and who influenced your writing?

It is not that anyone or any incident influenced me. I just write about what happened to me and what happened to others. I wrote about women’s rights because it came to me that I should protest injustice and inequalities. I became interested in literature because my older brother published and edited a literary magazine.

Do you think your life would have been different if you had been a product of the West?

Yes, I would not have had any problem. They didn’t have any problem with me and my writings. My book Anando, based on my girlhood, which was praised by European media was banned by Sheikh Hasina. She called it ‘obscene’. A girl who was sexually harassed is called obscene. That is very strange. I think if a man would have written the book, it would not have been considered obscene.

Read Part 1 of our two-part interview of Taslima Nasreen